Intel to sell wireless desktop cards

Maho Bay is a desktop platform wrapped around the recently launched Ivy Bridge desktop processor and Intel plans to enrich this platform with a Wireless mini card offer of its own.

The plan is to make new SKUs based on half Minicard (mPCIe) standard and offer it with its boards that have support for PCIe 1X or faster. Maho Bay also allows some combinations with Sandy Bridge processors and will allow the use of these mini Wireless cards on older processors with new boards. It looks like the Panther Point chipset is necessary even for older Sandy Bridge processors on Maho Bay platform.

The top range card with premium performance is Intel Centrino Ultimate N 6300, and the card has virtually the same specification like its mobile brother. It supports Intel Wireless Display as well as Intel My Wifi technology and quick driver connect.

Since it is using 3x3 antennas and MIMO standard it us capable of achieving speeds of 450Mbits per second and it does support multiple streams. It supports dual band 2.4 + 5 GHz and Intel Vpro. This is still a 802.11n based product as Intel hasn’t really jumped the gun to support 802.11ac in 2012.

It looks like it is too early for Intel to embrace this new standard due to its very limited market penetration.

At some point Intel will include 802.11ac products in its portfolio but according to our sources this won’t happen before Q2 2013 at earliest. Intel has total of 7 mini PCIe 1X Wireless cards to offer where five of them support WiDi and two lower end satisfy with 150Mbits per second.